"Twelve years ago my friends in Europe called me 'ski crazy',"
writes the author, "And they were right--still are. For even in
my childhood skiing held for me an irresistible lure. It brought
me great happiness--the happines of blazing ski trails from peak
to peak. Indeed, so powerful was this urge to travel on 'wings
of wood' that no amount of ridicule could check or even lessen
its force."

Fridtjof Nansen offered to the youth of Europe the promise of
a new life. He called it "Idraet," which means in Norse
"Go back to nature," and he pointed out the way to fulfill it,
skimming on skis across the snow covered regions of the earth.
"It was scarcely more than a decade ago that this new and
invigorating life in Europe began."

The author taught skiing in Europe and made "the first and
only crossing" of the Alps from Vienna to Mont Blanc on skis in
winter, taking 146 days. She came to America and in January 1931
skied across the Presidential Range in New England. "It proved
to me the possibilities for advancing the white sport in the
United States," she writes. She traveled west and "soon various
different mountains of the Cascade Range saw for the first time
this modern weapon, the ski, conquering the steepest and most
difficult approaches."

She describes in detail a solo ski-climb of Mt Baker from the
northeast. Leaving Mt Baker Lodge shortly after midnight, she
skied toward the mountain and climbed the Mazama and Rainbow
glaciers, following a cougar to the bergschrund. She skied a
short distance above, then switched to crampons and cut steps up
the ice wall toward the summit. She described her climb as "the
first and only solo ski ascent made by a woman to a majestic peak
in the United States" and "the zenith of my ski experience." Her
ascent took fifteen hours and from the summit she returned in
about two hours to the area of Ptarmigan Ridge, where she met
some of her ski students. They returned to the lodge together.

The author writes that "to me the primeval Pacific ranges are
more intriguing than those European heights so redolent of the
storied past." She calls Seattle the gateway to the Cascade
Range, "the counterpart of Munich in the Unites States." She says
of Ben Thompson, "This young man is a leader on the Pacific Coast
in the development of the most glorious of all winter sports, an
explorer who has made first ascents into the winter-white
regions."